Catriona MacLennan writes:
There is no such thing as identity politics.
This has as much credibility as someone saying there is no such thing as political correctness.
The term is used by white men seeking to hold on to their power and deny the human rights of Maori, Pasifika, women and LGBTQ people.
Sadly for MacLennan many opponents of identity politics are women, Maori and gay. So her argument fails at the first hurdle.
Liam Hehir writes:
There are all sorts of reasons why it is a bad idea to justify or encourage violence against those who hold repugnant views. Here are a few of them.
The first problem is one of definition. The word “fascism” has been robbed of all meaning through years of overuse. In fact, as long ago as 1946, no less than George Orwell wrote that, “the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable'”.
To listen to the activists of the Left and Right, both John Key and Barack Obama were fascists. No doubt Bill English will get the same treatment. When the man who attacked John Banks with animal excrement was convicted for assault, he responded by throwing more excrement at the judge, saying she was a “fascist judge”.
When everybody calls everybody else a fascist at the drop of a hat and violence against fascists is justified, how are you not inviting violence by all against all?
I’ve been called a fascist. Almost everyone on the right of politics has been. And I’ve had many threats of violence over the years, including death threats,
Secondly, the history of actual fascism shows that it thrives when fists start flying. The Nazis rose to power in an environment where physical brawling was part of the culture. When it comes to fighting in the street, ideologies committed to thuggery and passionate intolerance tend to have the advantage over the gentler forces of moderation and liberalism.
So if you are really concerned that fascism may rise again, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to applaud behaviour that recreates the conditions that enabled it to grab power in the first place. Don’t throw Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.
Yep.
Then there’s the simple fact that it’s immoral to physically assault people on the basis of their political views – however gross they happen to be.
In the aftermath of the Spencer attack, it was truly weird to see outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post and Vox Media wrestle with this notion like it was a serious ethical question. Even popular comedy site Cracked weighed in, asking, “So are we allowed to just punch Nazis now?” Their answer? “It’s complicated.”
It really isn’t.
The whole point of liberal democracy is that political questions are resolved through votes and laws and not mobs and violence. People have the right to be grievously wrong and, as long as they do not call for the illegal overthrow of the state, to voice their wayward views. We really have no choice but to trust the public and our governing institutions.
Because if you think it’s OK to punch someone in the head because you think they’re a fascist, then you might be one yourself.
Well they’re not fascists but they’re certainly not liberals.
The Herald reports:
Former Prime Minister John Key says a conversation with Helen Clark helped make his decision to retire while at the top of his game – but admits it was the hardest decision of his life and he did wake up in the night wondering about it.
An updated edition of John Roughan’s John Key: Portrait of a Prime Minister includes further material from the final years of Key’s time as Prime Minister as well as a post-resignation interview.
In it, Key says he made the final decision after a trip to New York last September, during which he had also had a conversation with Clark, who left Parliament after she was defeated by Key’s National Party in 2008.
Key says that in the conversation, he and Clark discussed the right time for a Prime Minister to resign. He did not believe she realised the significance of the conversation at the time, saying it was “a conversation she didn’t know she was having”.
Clark served one more year as PM than Key, but her legacy will always be remembered for how it ended by losing an election.
Key was back in Parliament this week but told Roughan he had signed up for the international speaking circuit, was likely to get back into investment banking and was likely to turn down a request to be on the board of an American airline: “It would feel a bit like coaching the Wallabies.”
Heh good call.
Stuff reports:
It has cost the public healthcare system about $750,000 in the past year to manage Ashley Peacock, an autistic man whose isolation has sparked human rights concerns.
The Capital & Coast District Health Board (CCDHB) confirmed the spending before a parliamentary health select committee on Wednesday.
Peacock, who is a compulsory patient under the Mental Health Act, is an intellectually disabled, autistic and mentally ill man who has spent the past five years in at a Porirua facility, spending up to 23 hours a day in his isolation wing.
Agencies, including the Human Rights Commission, have raised concerns about his treatment, with the United Nations funding its review of the use of seclusion in New Zealand.
That’s a huge amount of money one just one patient. Considering how tight health budgets are, I can’t imagine they would be keeping him so secluded in such a costly way if there was a safe alternative.
The DHB’s written response to the Greens’ select committee questions outlined that its reasons for continuing to hold him as an inpatient under the Mental Health Act was because his psychotic illness was resistant to treatment, and he was assessed as being at a very high risk of harm to others.
It’s easy to think that he would get better if he was allowed out more, but in some cases it simply isn’t the case.
The SSC has published statistics on how many OIA requests different agencies have received and what percentage get responded to within the legislated time-frame.
Those who got 100%, and had more than 25 requests were:
Then in order we have:
At the bottom end we have:
No organisation should be below say 90% let alone 75%.
The organisations that had the most requests were:
Weird that the Fire Service gets so many. The number the Police get is fairly staggering also.
What would be useful supplement to this data is if SSC published (as the Ombudsman does for complaints) how many requests come from companies, individuals, organisations, media, MP, political parties. I’d also publish a list of the 10 most frequent OIA submitters across all of Government.
Michele Hewitson in the Listener interviews David Shearer:
Somebody tweeted: “After seven years in the Labour Party, David Shearer was looking for a safe, stable workplace, and he’s found that in South Sudan.” Is that funny? I ask him. If bleakly.
“Ha, ha. Yeah. It’s that old apocryphal story attributed to lots of politicians asked what it’s like standing across from the enemy. And the answer is: ‘That’s not the enemy. That’s the opposition. The enemy’s behind me.’ And, yeah, that’s what it felt like in many ways.”
Never given a chance.
The man ban really was the stuff of the loony bin. It proposed that some electorates allow only women candidates and received what ought to have been a predictable response. Shearer was against it and “that got me offside with some of the women in our party. I was receiving hundreds of letters about that policy and probably 95 out of 100 were totally against the man ban.”
The proposed policy also got him offside with his wife. “I remember walking in here and Nush was standing there and she said, ‘What the f— did you do that for? Don’t you think that I’ve got the ability to stand up against men? Who do you think you are? You guys.’ She was furious.”
They don’t have the man ban in place for electorates but effectively do for the party list. They have to rank the list so the caucus is 50/50.
They are likely to have six more electorate MPs who are male than female so the first six (after Little) on the list must be female.
He is off to head a peacekeeping outfit when he couldn’t keep the peace in his own party. Is that ironic? “Yeah,” he agrees, hardly sourly at all. Perhaps he wasn’t tough enough. “Umm. Possibly. Probably because I wasn’t perceived as being left enough; as too much of a centrist.”
No room for Shearer (or Jones) in a party heading more and more to the hard left.
The Washington Post editorial:
WE INTERRUPT coverage of tumult in Congress and the administration with two pieces of good news. Both reflect progress American society has made in recognizing the dignity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
The White House announced Tuesday that, contrary to anonymous reports, the president will not reverse executive orders extending workplace protections to LGBT federal workers. The administration statement accurately and encouragingly recalled that Mr. Trump made a point of standing up for LGBT rights in his speech to the Republican National Convention last July, noting that he was “proud” to have done so.
Trump is arguably the most pro-LGBT Republican President there has been!
The Progress Report has a useful calculator for working out what the Labour Caucus will look like. It shows what a problem Labour has with their list ranking.
Let’s start with Labour getting the same party vote as last time, and Labour winning the same number of electorate seats except Hutt South (which will very likely go to National’s Chris Bishop).
They get 15 male electorate MPs and 11 female electorate MPs. Overall 32 MPs so six List Mps.
With Little No 1 on the list, then the next five have to be female to have gender equality.
At 31% (a level they have very rarely polled) they get 38 MPs. So they could get two male List MPs on top of Little – presumably David Parker and Trevor Mallard.
Now after the current caucus you have Raymond Huo (about to be an MP again) and Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson competing for places. Now to keep gender equality they would need a caucus of 44 MPs to get them all in. For that they need to get 35% of the vote And they were only above 30% in the average of the public polls once last year.
On current polling not a single male list candidate should get elected to Parliament, except Little. The only way they can do it is to ignore their own rules on gender equality or hope they get a magical 10% increase in their vote!10
The Herald reports:
Deborah Russell has been announced as the Labour Party’s candidate to contest the New Lynn electorate in the general election.
Russell, a tax expert from Massey University, will replace the outgoing David Cunliffe from the traditionally safe Labour seat.
Russell was seen as an outsider in the bid to be Labour’s candidate, but had the support of the party’s hierarchy.
How disappointing that Labour has chosen a respected tax policy expert with excellent communication skills over the guy who set up a secret trust for David Cunliffe while Labour were campaigning against secret trusts.
While I will disagree with Deborah on many issues, I think she will be a very effective MP and (one day a) Minister. Good to see the best candidate win selection.
Richard Harman writes:
Prime Minister Bill English’s Waitangi Day gamble appears to have paid off.
His decision not to go to Waitangi itself left him open to criticism that it was the responsibility of the Prime Minister to be at Waitangi whether the mood there was “good or bad” as Labour Leader Andrew Little put it
Yet Little himself has said he now won’t go, due to the media ban. Little has been all over the place on this. On the same day where he conceded he would not attend in future (if ban not lifted), he had an op ed appear attacking Bill English for not attending. Own goal.
All of this made Labour’s complaints about the Prime Minister not being there look a little lame.
Indeed, privately, Labour MPs at Waitangi, said it might have been better if the party had also reserved its position about attending and left the option open of walking out of Te Tii.
Tamaki Makaurau MP Peeni Henare said his grandfather, Sir James Henare, a Tai Tokerau leader, had long regarded the Te Tii Marae as trouble and had therefore refused ever to visit it.
Little ended up saying that if the media ban were still in place year, Labour would not attend.
A pretty bad weekend for Little with his position on Waitangi becoming ridiculous and the backlash to his handpicked Willie Jackson candidature.
Meanwhile Bill English got a great reception at Orakei Marae:
But in two speeches at Ngati Whatua’s Orakei Marae he set out the Government’s commitment to the Treaty partnership in one of his most fluent and relaxed presentations since assuming the Prime Ministership last December.
And he also had a no drama call with the President of the United States. English’s decision to bypass Waitangi turned out to be incredibly well judged.
Stuff reports:
A former Zimbabwe secret police officer who murdered for President Robert Mugabe’s regime has entered New Zealand on a fake passport and is trying to set up a life here.
William Nduku, his tribal name, arrived in New Zealand in 2015. Living in limbo, he was refused asylum or the right to work and study and has been forced to survive on handouts from friends and the expat community and could face death if deported back to Zimbabwe.
I await the Green Party petition to demand he be given asylum.
He said at 19, he was forced to serve in Mugabe’s secret police and participated in up to 20 murders, several rapes and multiple tortures.
Of course now he would say he was forced to serve, but you know what – secret police tend to be the most fanatical loyal supporters of a regime, not conscripts.
He could have fled before he murdered, tortured and raped 20+ people. But he didn’t.
Nduku spent several months in Mt Eden prison. While in prison he alleged members of the Mongrel Mob assaulted him on a regular basis.
“It was awful. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anybody.”
Yeah almost as bad as being raped and tortured.
Nduku said he had been living off the generosity of others in Auckland, forced to try and make a living without the right to work.
Well not a lot of work available for murderers in New Zealand.
“It sometimes feels like the Government wants me to steal so that I can survive. I will never take anything that does not belong to me.”
Oh poor diddums. He will murder, rape and torture but he draws the line at stealing.
“I once stole a mango out of hunger, and my mother gave me such a beating for it. My mother raised us right.”
The mothers of his victims might disagree.
Human rights attorney Deborah Manning, who represents Nduku, has tried and failed to convince New Zealand’s Government to issue him a work or student visa.
Good. He should not be working, studying or living here.
Politico reports:
Still, not all of Trump’s phone calls have gone off the rails.
The trick to a good call with Trump is less about policy agreement than personal chemistry, said two people familiar with some of the world leader talks.
For example, New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English began his Sunday evening call with Trump by thanking the president for taking the time to talk during the Super Bowl and chatting about New Zealand golfer Bob Charles, said someone briefed on the call. The person said that set the tone for an amicable conversation, even though English went on to express disagreement with Trump’s executive order restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
This is good. Regardless of what you personally think of Trump, he is the President of the United States for the next 206 weeks, and you want heads of governments to be able to engage constructively with each other.
David Seymour did an AMA on Reddit. A very interesting read, where he gets quizzed on all sorts of policies and issues.
A woman in Huntly made a vile rant against some Muslim women who were walking by. One of them recorded it so we could see how vile some people are and how they treat strangers. Catherine Delahunty the Green MP jumps in and concludes that this is an example of Pakeha racism.
The only problem of course is that the women in question appears to be Maori. Would be sensible for a Member of Parliament not to make assumptions before she labels something as Pakeha racism.
Quite cool to have a Prime Minister who can shear sheep. And while of course Sir David Fagan let him win, I thought Bill looked to be in pretty good nick.
Tracy Watkins writes:
Two things happened after Bill English named the election date that should worry his opponents.
National used its advantage to hit the ground running – promising more cops, whacking petrol companies about the head with an inquiry into pricing, and wiping historic homosexuality convictions.
Meanwhile, Labour squandered its good start to the year.
Add to that English’s good call on Waitangi and Little’s bad calls. And the liberalisation of medicinal cannabis.
One of Little’s MPs even hired a PR firm to publicly call him out on it. MPs have been expelled for less.
Again, extraordinary.
Only one of these parties looks like it’s ready for an election.
The other looks like a candidate for euthanasia.
Kiwis have an insatiable appetite for Donald Trump. The world stops, even when Trump mouthpiece Sean Spicer speaks.
For the political junkies among us, it’s overwhelming – and strangely gratifying – to be surrounded by so many new sufferers of our disorder.
But this is a new, extreme-tourism style of politics; loud, dangerous and frenetic. And it’s sucking up the political oxygen here.
The same day that English announced nearly 1000 new cops, the story broke about Trump’s “worst call by far” abuse of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. No contest.
The Opposition is finding it even harder to get traction.
But what happens when exhaustion sets in and Trump’s power to shock is diminished? Will a politics-weary public switch off?
That could be fatal for Labour and the Greens. When the phone is off the hook it’s hard for opposition parties to get cut through.
Dirty Politics and Dot Com sucked up all the media last time, which helped National. Will Trump do the same? Who cares about the new housing policy announced by Labour, have you seen Donald Trump’s latest outraegous tweet!
But there is another scenario. One in which we get swept along by the same forces of extreme anti-establishment-ism, a deep cynicism with the political system and a rejection of the status quo.
The things that were broken that drove change in Britain and the United States are not so broken here. There is still a high level of trust in the integrity of our institutions, immigration has not produced the same pressures as in Britain (and the rest of Europe) and we are untouched by terrorism.
But Brexit and the US election were notable for the willingness of some deliberately to erode public confidence in the system and not always by telling the truth.
Will the rules also be thrown out the window here?
Hopefully not, but Winston will try. He has a Trump like connection to telling the truth.
The Blaze reports:
Scott Adams, creator the famed “Dilbert” comic strip, has been capturing attention over the last year or so with his observations about President Donald Trump and the public’s reaction to him. …
But in the wake of the riots at the University of California, Berkeley, over an appearance by alt-right firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, Adams’ gloves appear to be completely off.
Adams said he’s ending his support of Berkeley, where he received an MBA years ago. “I have been a big supporter lately, with both my time and money, but that ends today,” he wrote in his blog post last Friday. “I wish them well, but I wouldn’t feel safe or welcome on the campus. A Berkeley professor made that clear to me recently. He seems smart, so I’ll take his word for it.”
Referring to Yiannopoulos, Adams said he “decided to side with the Jewish gay immigrant who has an African-American boyfriend, not the hypnotized zombie-boys in black masks who were clubbing people who hold different points of view. I feel that’s reasonable, but I know many will disagree, and possibly try to club me to death if I walk on campus.”
A great sentence in bold.
Hayden Donnell at The Spinoff angrily rebuts all the people saying that Labour is not unified, and does a point by point rebuttal.
It is well worth reading his post, so you get some balance to the views of myself and others who think Labour does have problems.
The Herald reports:
It was the feature that Netflix users had been waiting for, but it could prove to be a costly headache for the streaming giant.
Late last year, Netflix introduced a feature that allowed users to download content and watch it while they’re offline. It’s a fairly standard concept but Netflix took its time in rolling out the feature, perhaps because it was preparing its defences.
A company known solely for its work as a “patent troll” has now filed a lawsuit against the streaming giant claiming it owns the patent over the basic idea of downloading video from the internet for offline consumption.
A patent troll is a company whose business model is based primarily, if not entirely, on buying up patents and suing other companies for potential infringements in an effort to gouge money out of large businesses.
And that is exactly what Blackbird Technologies hopes to achieve at the expense of Netflix.
The company was founded by two former corporate patent lawyers, Wendy Verlander and Chris Freeman, and last week they filed a complaint against Netflix, as well as separate suits against Soundcloud, Vimeo and a few other online services for breaching their patent. …
The patent pertains to a system that allows website content to be downloaded and burned to a writeable CD and automatically sent to someone, without any human interaction.
This is why NZ did a very good thing in abolishing patents for software. The industry in the US is mired in patent lawsuits which do nothing but enrich lawyers and punish innovation.
Rodney Hide writes:
I would love to be able to speak te reo fluently. I would also like to play the violin, solve Einstein’s field equations and run a sub-three hour marathon.
I can’t do any of these things. It’s not that I am lazy. It’s that I am busy. I figure the reward wouldn’t justify the required effort. My priorities are where the effort is less and the reward greater.
There in a nutshell is the problem with making te reo compulsory in schools.
It would be marvellous if all our children were fluent but it would come with a cost. Students don’t now have an hour a day at school with nothing to do. That means dropping something in their curriculum to make way for te reo.
That’s where the Green and Labour MPs fall down. They don’t explain what is to be given up. Is it physical education, mathematics, science or English? Or a bit of each?
Schools and students should have flexibility as to what they teach rather than one size fits all. English, Science and Mathematics are basics which everyone needs some proficiency in to survive in the world.
The Greens at various times have said they want the following to be compulsory or near compulsory in schools:
All arguably worthwhile stuff but as Rodney says every hour on one thing is an hour less for something else.
Fuseworks Media announced:
Political historian and writer Michael Bassett has been close to government for more than 50 years and has a unique perspective, having been in parliament with 11 Prime Ministers.
In case you are wondering who they are, they are:
Interesting that in his 18 years he was in Parliament with 18 PMs.
If you entered Parliament in 2002, then in 15 years you would have served with just two PMs – Clark and Key.
Now, in an election year, Bassett offers a timely and incisive appraisal of our 24 former leaders in forthcoming book New Zealand’s Prime Ministers: From Dick Seddon to John Key, published by David Ling Publishing in April 2017.
Can’t wait to read it. Bassett is a great writer and historian.
Bassett’s book reveals fresh insights into each Prime Minister’s personality and examines their distinctive styles, thinking, successes and failures. He also takes a long hard look at what worked with the public, and what didn’t.
Bassett says, “Of our 24 past Prime Ministers, John Key was the easiest in his skin. There was never any artifice about him. What you saw was what you got. He wasn’t our greatest Prime Minister: that honour goes to Peter Fraser who shepherded New Zealand through World War Two and in Winston Churchill’s words ‘never put a foot wrong’.
I agree with Fraser being the greatest.
Based on extensive, careful archival research, interviews with recent Prime Ministers, many of their colleagues, and with their opponents, this major work is the product of decades of appreciative and insightful observation. It is essential reading for anyone interested in New Zealand politics.
I’ve already asked for a copy!
These started with the Netherlands and now a couple of dozen countries have done one. To date I think the Swiss one is the best, but this one isn’t bad.